Integrating the Role of Computational Intelligence and Digital Signal Processing in Education: Emerging Technologies and Mathematical Tools

Abstract

Rapid progress in the development of technological and computational tools has motivated substantial changes in the educational approach to the different disciplines of signal, image, and video processing. Moreover, the parallel evolution of sensor systems, data acquisition methods, and computational intelligence has emphasized the importance of signal processing and information engineering, particularly its role in integrating different scientific disciplines through the use of a common set of tools and underlying mathematics. Modern educational courses follow these trends and generally combine the teaching of fundamental computational methods of signal and system modeling with applications to selected case studies. The unifying idea is to apply similar mathematical methods for data processing in completely diverse areas. Emerging methods used in education contribute to this progress, and they provide opportunities to bring together specialists from different disciplines. New technologies facilitate real or virtual activities through excursions to remote laboratories, allowing the demonstration of robotic and speech recognition systems, for example. Participation in seminars, videoconferences, and discussions during colloquia meetings, when included in educational courses, can form further progressive and attractive teaching methods for the rapidly developing interdisciplinary area of signal processing.